of
such various circumstance, to come to the same conclusion. Manning's
answer was slow and deliberate: '_Their common bond is their want of
truth._' 'I was surprised beyond measure,' Mr. Gladstone would proceed,
'and startled at his judgment.'[193]

Most ordinary churchmen remained where they were. An erastian statesman
of our own time, when alarmists ran to him with the news that a couple
of noblemen and their wives had just gone over to Rome, replied with
calm, 'Show me a couple of grocers and their wives who have gone over,
then you will frighten me.' The great body of church people stood firm,
and so did Pusey, Keble, Gladstone, and so too, for half a dozen years
to come, did his two closest friends, Manning and Hope. The dominant
note in Mr. Gladstone's mind was clear and it was constant. As he put it
to Manning (August 1,1845),--'That one should entertain love for the
church of Rome in respect of her virtues and her glories, is of course
right and obligatory; but one is equally bound under the circumstances
of the English church in direct antagonism with Rome to keep clearly in
view their very fearful opposites.'

Tidings of the great secession happened to find Mr. Gladstone in a
rather singular atmosphere. In the course of 1842, to the keen distress
of her relatives, his sister had joined the Roman church, and her
somewhat peculiar nature led to difficulties that taxed patience and
resource to the uttermost. She had feelings of warm attachment to her
brother, and spoke strongly in that sense to Dr. Wiseman; and it was for
the purpose of carrying out some plans of his father's for her
advantage, that in the autumn of 1845 (September 24-November 18), Mr.
Gladstone passed nearly a couple of months in Germany. The duty was
heavy and dismal, but the journey brought him into a society that could
not be without effect upon his impressionable mind. At Munich he laid
the foundation of one of the most interesting and cherished friendships
of his life. Hope-Scott had already made the acquaintance of Dr.
Doellinger, and he now begged Mr. Gladstone on no account to fail to
present himself to him, as well as to other learned and political men,
'good catholics and good men with no ordinary talent and information.'
'Nothing,' Mr. Gladstone once wrote in after years, 'ever so much made
me anglican _versus_ Roman as reading in Doellinger over forty years ago
the history of the fourth century and Athanasius _contra mundum_.' Here